Could California swing the Republican nomination?

The race for the 2012 Republican nomination for president has defied expectations so often that it’s fair to say that there is no more conventional wisdom as far as this contest is concerned. Unpredictability is the new normal.

In this new environment where pundits’ predictions are routinely defied, now would be a good time to revisit the question of whether California’s 5 million Republican voters will have a meaningful voice in who will serve as the party’s standard-bearer in November.

Conventional wisdom holds that the contest for the GOP nomination will be over before the Golden State’s June 5 primary. And at the risk of being proven wrong, that remains the most likely outcome. Yet a few things have changed recently.

Due to ongoing redistricting legislation, the Texas primary has been moved to later in the process and will not take place before May 29, or just a week before California. Texas will have 155 delegates to the national convention. A total of 1,044 votes are needed for a candidate to secure the nomination.

California will send 172 delegates. Together with Texas, the two states will hold 29 percent of the votes a candidate needs to win.

National party rules require every state that votes in January or February to allocate their delegates proportionally. Conversely, many of the states voting in March or later will be winner-take-all, which could result in a candidate quickly racking up delegates if state-by-state results uniformly mirror national polls.

But what if they don’t? What if Rick Santorum and/or Newt Gingrich each win a few Super Tuesday states and the fight drags on into late March and April? If it is a three-way contest at that stage, worry about a contested or brokered convention will spike. Such a phenomenon occurs when no candidate has earned enough delegates to win the nomination outright. A majority of the delegates, not a mere plurality, is required to secure the nomination.

In 2010, my colleagues and I on the Republican National Committee changed national party rules to curtail the “front-loading” of delegates that resulted in such a quick contest in 2008. Together with the Democratic National Committee, the incentive structure was altered to provide for a longer primary season.

Several states jumped the gun and violated the rules by scheduling their primaries or caucuses earlier than national party rules allowed. These states were penalized by having their delegate allocations cut in half. As a result, very few delegates have actually been awarded thus far, and the vast majority of states have abided by the rules to create a longer road to the nomination.

If no clear front-runner in the delegate count emerges by the end of April, Texas and California will move to the center of the political universe. These two gigantic, expensive states could then hold the keys to the nomination and determine whether we are headed for a brokered convention.

Although California votes late enough to be winner-take-all, it isn’t. Under rules adopted in 2000 and first put into effect in 2004, the California Republican Party will allocate delegates proportionally by congressional district. In 2008, John McCain won in 48 of 53 districts, with Mitt Romney winning in the remaining five.